The saying “don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk” provides a glance into the insightful cognitive mechanism of zero-derived words (e.g., the first talk and walk in the title), words that are changed into another form without inflectional/derivational markers (e.g., -ize, -ify). In learning of these words, metaphor and metonymy (MM) play an important role in the transformation process and can reveal how language users perceive the relationship between words. In our view, through MM, learners are exposed to a new angle of viewing and learning vocabulary, which benefits their long-term memory, and prepares them for more autonomous vocabulary learning in the future.

The workshop will mainly focus on teaching verbs whose original forms are nouns, like “pocket” in “pocket the jewels”. Explicit learning of metaphor and metonymy is believed to help students make association between the meaning of the vocabulary and the referred object (Chen, 2019).

In this workshop, three teaching methods will be introduced by categorizing the zero-derived verbs, namely terminal/ final point (i.e., getting the entities to a certain place/ their final state), instrument (i.e., using the instrument with its usual function), and imitation (i.e., finding the similarities between two things). Depending on the difficulty of the words, the methods can be used by teachers of both primary and secondary schools, and can also be applied to other types of converted words (e.g., verbs derived from adjectives, nouns derived from verbs).

            The workshop aims to provide inspirations for teaching zero-derived words. Participants will be introduced the basic knowledge about MM and the abovementioned teaching methods. Moreover, they will experience the approach through different kinds of activities, brainstorming, and sharing.